[chatwinra]

This talk about agile by one of the founders was posted on Hacker News a while back, it is good, and I think complements this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548334

To summarise, the issue Dave Thomas has with agile is that it has become a prescriptive framework, 'Agile' (with a capital 'A'), rather than what it originally started out to be, which is a means of being agile (small 'a').

I really liked this talk, and agree with both him and the OP of this thread that some parts of the 'Scrum' as a prescriptive framework may not work for you.

I find it a bit strange that the OP singled out the retrospective as being a negative- for me this is the best part about 'Scrum', as long as you're not too prescriptive about it.

Really the retrospective is a chance to improve yourselves as team each sprint, and it's a chance for people to get stuff off their chests. It shouldn't be just about scrum, it can be anything - adopting new approaches to development eg: TDD, discussing the state of the code, anything. That's what makes them (for me anyway and I think(!) my teams) enjoyable & useful meetings.

[blub]

An effective retrospective requires creating a safe environment for sharing ideas and a SM which can foster such an environment.

I am guessing that such an environment is quite rare, hence the percieved lack of utility of the retrospective.

I can speak from experience that this is very hard to do. I expect that I will have to deal with a brewing technical conflict in the team soon and I'm not sure what's the best way to do it. I've also seen what happens if such coflicts are sweeped under the carpet and it's not nice.